Increase Social Sharing with Content Marketing

Whenever you’re trying to promote a certain product or service, you use social media platforms. You post calls to actions, links to blog posts and articles, and other types of updates that are supposed to attract and engage a huge base of followers. How could you possibly know you’re getting someone engaged? By the likes and shares, of course!

The content you post on social media has a huge effect upon the results you achieve through the marketing campaign. It has to be tailored in accordance with the interests of your audience, and you have to find the perfect tone that will intrigue them to check what’s new on your page every day.

Social media dominance has another aspect, too: you want people to share not only the updates you post on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms, but the content from the website as well. You want more visitors coming to your website, and you expect them to share the pages directly through their own profiles. That’s how you know they really support you.

So, how do you start dominating social media through content marketing? We have some tips that will help you.

Craft the perfect headlines

When someone checks out a really cool piece of content at your website, the headline is the first thing they will see. If it doesn’t grab their attention, they will not read the post and they will definitely not share it, so all your efforts to write great content will go in vain. The headline is also important because it appears in Facebook posts. In fact, it’s the only thing people on social media will see. It needs to be captivating if you want the users to click the link and visit the site.

Here are few quick tips that will help you craft a great headline:

Use a number. People love top lists and specific tips in the form of listicles. They like knowing exactly what they are about to read, and a number gives the element of predictability a title needs. Here is an example: 5 Things You Need to Do to Grab Attention on Social Media.

Use attention-grabbing adjectives, such as free, easy, fun, beautiful, breathtaking, ultimate, essential, weird, and so on.

Make a promise. Every online user wants to gain value by reading some post. Promise specific solutions to ‘seduce’ more people to like and share the content.

Ask a question you know your audience has. Why Are People Stressed Out? – that’s a nice example, since your target audience might have that question, so they will want to find out the answer through your post.

Choose great photos

Content marketing is much more than writing a cool textual post. You can compose the best piece of content on the Internet, but you’ll still leave it without many readers if you don’t make it attractive for the audience. The first (and sometimes the only) aspect that attracts people’s attention is the visual content that goes along your text. It may be a cool photograph, meme, infographic, presentation, graph, or anything else that captures the meaning of the text.

Piktochart, Vizualize, and Easel.ly are great tools for creating infographics and other types of cool visual content. People rest their eyes with the visual elements, so make sure to use them to break up the text.

Your first thought when looking for the perfect image may be stock photography. There is a problem with that idea: most of the photos you’ll encounter on stock photography websites have been used dozens of times on similar posts to yours. Plus, they have zero personality. Stay away from cheesy photos and make sure to choose something unique. If you don’t find the perfect stock photo, you can always create a relevant poster, infographic, or meme.

Remember: the main photo appears as a thumbnail when you and other people share the post on social media, so it’s important to make it as attractive as possible.

Add social sharing buttons in all the right places

You can easily share your own posts all over social media: you just copy and paste the link. Do you think that a random website visitor will do the same? No! They will expect to find convenient social sharing buttons, so you better provide them! You should set the buttons in the beginning of the article, as well as at the end of the post, so people will easily find them. Floating social sharing bars are even better: they constantly remind the reader to share as they go through the post.

Your email subscribers are a good source of shares, too. They subscribed because they like your content, so you should make them able to share it directly from the email message. Mailchimp is one of the tools you can use for that purpose.

Did these 3 steps sound simple? They really are! It takes a lot of effort to write great content, so you can’t allow yourself to skip these easy steps after all that time you spent on a post. Social media platforms are accepting communities. You’ll always find audience for your posts. The trick is to make that audience as large as possible. Start making the first steps today!

Tom Jager is professional blogger. He works at Proessaywriting. He has degree in Law and English literature. Tom has written numerous articles/online journals. You can reach him at G+ or Facebook.

Great article on how to utilize content marketing to increase social sharing. Use of Floating social sharing bars is such a great idea to remind the reader to share our content on social media platform.